U.S. Woman Says Demjanjuk Was at Nazi Camp

By CLYDE HABERMAN,

Published: August 25, 1993

JERUSALEM, Aug. 24—
The "Ivan the Terrible" case of John Demjanjuk took a surprising turn today with the emergence of a New Jersey woman who says she survived the Nazi death camp at Sobibor in occupied Poland and remembers that Mr. Demjanjuk had been a guard there.

"He was there," Esther Raab, 71, of Vineland, N.J., told The Associated Press. "He was miserable like all of them. He wasn't any different. What were they there for? To kill."

Mrs. Raab, who could not be reached by phone from Jerusalem today despite repeated attempts, spoke briefly to the news agency on Monday after Nazi-hunters here had identified her as the first Sobibor survivor to claim having seen Mr. Demjanjuk at the camp, where some 250,000 Jews were killed during World War II.

Nazi-hunters, Holocaust survivors and other Israelis pressing for new war-crimes charges said they where looking to use her statements in their campaign to keep Mr. Demjanjuk in an Israeli prison. "If her testimony is credible and she can identify him, I think it will be a significant contribution to convince the Israeli Government to put him on trial for Sobibor," said Efraim Zuroff, Israel director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Once Seemed to Be Over

Whatever the merits of Mrs. Raab's account, the fact that she has suddenly spoken out strengthens the possibility that the Demjanjuk affair will continue to drag through the Israeli courts when only a few weeks ago it had seemed to be all over.

Mr. Demjanjuk (pronounced dem-yahn-YUKE) was convicted five years ago by an Israeli court of having been "Ivan the Terrible," the sadistic operator of the gas chamber at another Nazi death camp in occupied Poland, Treblinka, where an estimated 850,000 Jews died.

Last month, five justices of Israel's Supreme Court reversed the guilty verdict on the basis of reasonable doubt. But they also said there was compelling evidence that the Ukrainian-born Mr. Demjanjuk, who emigrated to the United States after the war, had gone through the Nazis' Trawniki training camp for guards and had later been assigned to Sobibor.

On the basis of that finding, Holocaust survivors and others have petitioned for a new Sobibor-based trial, but so far two panels of Supreme Court justices and the Israeli prosecutor's office have agreed that there is no public interest in new proceedings, given what they said was the uncertainty of a conviction.

Nonetheless, the petitioners have won several procedural victories that give them time to make their case. Their latest appeals are to be considered by Sept. 2, and even though they acknowledge that their chances for ultimate success are slender, further delays are conceivable. Mistaken Identity Claimed

From the start of his case in 1977, when he was living in Ohio, Mr. Demjanjuk has insisted that he was the victim of mistaken identity and that he himself was a prisoner of the Nazis in Poland, having been captured while serving in the Soviet Army.

But on his application to enter the United States after the war, he listed Sobibor as a place where he had spent time during the war. Later, he explained that he had picked a Polish town at random to mask his Ukrainian nationality so he could avoid being returned to the Soviet Union.

What exactly Mr. Demjanjuk was supposed to have done at the Sobibor camp is not clear, although Israeli prosecutors have argued that any guard was, by definition, an accessory to mass murder. Eight Sobibor survivors who are among the petitioners for a new trial have said they do not recognize him.

It is also unclear why Mrs. Raab did not speak out until now.

Providing scant details, she told The Associated Press that about 15 years ago an investigator had shown her photographs and that while she recognized a man in them, she said nothing. "I didn't want to say yes or no," she said to the news agency. "You live constantly with that fear in you."

She is now no longer afraid, she said. "Now it doesn't really matter," she said. "I've lived my life." 'So Fresh in My Mind'

Mrs. Raab said that she was at Sobibor for more than nine months before escaping in October 1943 and that Mr. Demjanjuk had been there in the summer of that year.

"I have a good memory," she said. "Every detail from Sobibor, every person, every face is so fresh in my mind. I might not remember what I ate yesterday, but I sure remember what happened there. It was the most important time of my life, and the worst time of my life."

Mr. Demjanjuk's lawyer, Yoram Sheftel, was said by his office to be out of the country, and could not be reached. But Edward Nishnic, Mr. Demjanjuk's son-in-law, told The Associated Press in Ohio that Mrs. Raab had failed several times to pick out his father-in-law's picture from a photo lineup.

"These alleged Nazi hunters are so determined to build up another false case against Mr. Demjanjuk that they have no feeling whatsoever for dragging survivors through public torment," he said.